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“... great creations of naming, recording and enjoying, in the worlds of Homer, Shakespeare, Milton or Dante. Kafka must find mastery in minuteness, in disappearance. Kafka’s sovereign perspective on psychoanalysis ought to have helped critics to detach from its constricting domain his own person at least. His struggle with his father was essentially never ...”

“... the Romantics’. They can see the point of Italy’s investment in another premodern writer, Dante, whose laments about the disunity of the Italian peninsula in the days of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines made him a fit dedicatee for countless Piazza Dantes during the Risorgimento. But alongside Sándor Petőfi, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Taras ...”

“... the same cosmopolitan European who hung out on the fringes of the Isherwood set in Berlin, read Dante in Italian, bought Ulysses when it first came out, stood next to James Joyce in a Parisian pissoir but was too shy to speak to him, and who even in his eighties could give my mother a hard time for not having quite reached the end of A la recherche du temps ...”

“... do nothing’ and that ‘the social and political history of Europe would be what it has been if Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Mozart, et al had never lived.’ That is a startling counterfactual to insist on quite so absolutely: you would be hard-pressed even to begin to demonstrate it. He professed to deplore Shelley for saying that poets were the ...”

“... opposition leaders Fox and Sheridan, escaping from their party’s wreck, exhibit a demeanour even Dante could not have rendered ‘more sullen and gloomy’.It may be wisest to think of caricature as a necessary recoil of society against its own coercive artifice – a partial antidote to some of the abuses of the modern state just as that state was ...”

“... the Poetic Heads Blake produced for his patron William Hayley’s Turret House in Felpham: Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and the boys. Trophies in whose glow the Sussex poetaster could bask, quietly absorbing their power.) But how much more interesting it would be, I thought, to discover in some south coast junkshop an engraved and finished copy ...”

“... with the title: ‘From the Fat Lady of the Sonnets’. The pained dentist who thought he was Dante al dente complained bitterly. And not only complained, but cried and prayed (he was a Catholic convert) and called us chartered murderers who assassinated writers as if they were so many characters. We were the hit-and-run men of culture. The Marxian ...”

“... or still lifes. His intolerances widened to include things he might have been expected to like: Dante, Milton, Spenser, Norse sagas. Broadly speaking he shied away from abstract schemas and humourlessness, prizing pragmatism and the moral claims of expediency, as a wisdom learned in the trenches. He disliked asceticism, because it mortgaged the present, and ...”

“... in the US; he also met a woman from Poland who told him a ‘story of horrors and torments that no Dante or Poe could possibly imagine’. But his mission was to save ‘the Hebrew nation in its land’ rather than to save Jews from destruction. As he told members of Mapai in 1938, ‘if I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by ...”

“... Roussel was certain that fame (also in French la gloire) would be his: ‘I was the equal of Dante and of Shakespeare, I was feeling what Victor Hugo had felt when he was 70, what Napoleon had felt in 1811 and what Tannhäuser had felt while musing on Venusberg.’ These recollections were confided to Pierre Janet, the psychiatrist who wrote up ...”

“... famous ‘Stalin Epigram’), by the ‘delectable mountains’, which the notes tell me is from Dante – as the circles are. The wheel is futility, it seems, as much as torture and automatism: a marriage of Ixion and Sisyphus. What one might term ‘political’ words are sprinkled, teasingly, almost haphazardly, over the poem: ‘power ...”

“... was described as a lovely man, ‘without the talent of saying hello’. Seamus made the case for Dante, for peaches, and for basil ice cream. Willa Muir, according to Karl, ‘was fighting a losing battle at Harvard with the homoerotic community, insulting the gays without realising they were gay’. We came round again to country matters, to re-argue the ...”

“... some paternal source. Even the great Duse, she believed, was first and foremost a ‘daughter of Dante’. Cather scorned the idea that being a woman novelist meant she was confined to dealing primarily with female characters or conventionally ‘feminine’ topics such as love and courtship. Some of her best novels (The Professor’s House, One of ...”

“... and a woman called Mrs Conway, a devout Catholic from Cork, whom James Joyce would immortalise as Dante or Mrs Riordan in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In this house, John Stanislaus would entertain the rising class of Parnellites and his musical friends.Despite his job and his rents, John Stanislaus found it hard to live within his means, and was ...”

“... been dreaming since his childhood’; the relation of Freud to his patients was that of Virgil to Dante; perhaps most arresting of all, the Interpretation of Dreams is ‘a vast poem in free verse’. But without being in two minds, for she is a fervent believer, the idiom can also be troubled. ‘But this episode too ended in fiasco’ (of Freud’s ...”